Taught By

Diana E.E. Kleiner

Transcript

Every Roman city had its bath buildings. Most of the houses did not have running water. So baths were extremely important, obviously. So, most cities had more than one. And in fact most cities, Pompeii for example, seems to have had about three bath buildings. They're very important both in terms of their social, but their need, you know, their practical needs and also is a place for social interaction. But also because there is some very interesting architectural experiments that took place in them. I'm going to show you in the course of the semester the development from the simplest bath buildings such as the ones in Pompeii to the most elaborate. Those of you who visited the Baths of Caracalla in Rome that's an example of one of the huge and, and, and most elaborate bath buildings. I show you here on the left hand side of the screen just as an example a view of one of the rooms of the forum baths in Pompeii, the caldarium, or warm room. All of these baths had multiple spaces within them. One of the distinctions of the earlier baths was that that the men's sections and the women's sections were separate from one another. And I hate to say it, but the men had all the great rooms. They were bigger and they were more ornately decorated as this one is. The warm room of the men's baths at Pompeii. But you can see here even in much smaller scale than a building like the Pantheon and much earlier than the Pantheon they're beginning to explore the curvatures of the wall the, the semi dome there. And the way in which you can create light effects by putting holes or what's called an oculus a round hole in the, in part of the ceiling and other rectangular holes in the ceiling to create fantastic light effects. So they're already exploring that here in Pompeii. When we look at some of the larger bathing establishments, the Baths of Caracalla still look. Well they're, they're a hulk, they're essentially a pile of, of concrete faced with brick, today, as any of you who've seen it know, but the scale is truly colossal. And you're, and one is very impressed when one wanders around the Baths of Caracalla, but some of the others, for example, the base of Diocletian, have been reused in modern times. It's one of the reasons that so many Roman buildings survive is because of this kind of re-use over the centuries. This the Baths of Diocletian part of which was transformed into a church at first by decorated at one point in part by Michelangelo and what we're looking here the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Saint Mary of the Angels, [COUGH] what we're looking at here is a view. Into what was the cold room or the frigidarium of the Baths of Diocletian but transformed into a church, used as the nave of the church of Saint Mary of the Angels. But if you look very closely you'll see those same cross or groin vaults that we saw in the Markets of Trajan. That are also used here to lift the ceiling, in a very effective way. And then all these multi-colored columns that you see are actually the columns from the ancient building. So, even in this interior Santa Maria degli Angeli, we can get a sense of how ornate some of the decorations of some of these bath buildings were. We're going to look at Roman theaters this semester. This is an example of one, the spectacular Roman theatre at Orange in the south of France. You see it here. I'm not going to go into the parts of of a, of a theatre or it's relationship to earlier Greek theatrical architecture, but you can see the stair. You can see the seats. You can see the orchestra. You can see the stage building. A stage building that initially was decorated with a forest of columns, only a couple of which survived, as well as a lot of sculptural decoration again, most of which does not survive. But one of the, one of the points I want to make today is that the Greeks tended to build, the Greeks always built their theatres on hillsides. They used the natural hill to support the seats. And that's true at Orange as well. The Romans were not content to build their, to build their their theaters only on hillsides. They wanted to build their theaters where they wanted to build their theaters, and if they wanted to build a theater in downtown Rome, they wanted to build a theater in downtown Rome. So what they did was that they used concrete again to build a hill, to build a hill upon which they could support those same seats. And that's, again, an innovation that we'll talk about. This is the Theatre of Marcellus in Rome, the earliest surviving stone theatre in Rome, in the age that dates to the age of Augustus, but I show it to you again just to show you the wonders of Google Earth. I've looked at this building a zillion times, I've wandered around it. It is most of the ancient part is over on this side, and I'll show that to you in another lecture. But over time this is one of those buildings that was transformed into all sorts of things. Most recently into a fabulous condominium. But as you wander around it today you can't, you get a sense of some of the high rise apartments that have been added to the original theater, but you can't get a full sense of it unless you go up above it. And so here's where again Google Earth is so helpful because we can look down on the entire complex. See the garden, see some of the apartments. See the circular driveway and so on and so forth. Which gives us information that it would be possible to glean anywhere else. And here is, if you let that, that transformation from modern Rome to ancient Rome take place on Google Earth, this is what you're going to get for that same Theatre of Marcellus. We just saw it in it's, what it looks like today on Google Earth. Here's what it looks like when you let it transform completely into the Theater of Marcellus from ancient times. The Colosseum, the very icon of Rome. No Roman city was without its amphitheater, it's place for gladiatorial and animal combat. And Rome was no exception. The most famous surviving Roman amphitheatre is the Colosseum. I show it to you here from the inside rather than the outside initially, because I can, it allows me to illustrate the places where the animals were kept down below. But also to show you that, that building has been used as a quarry. It was use by the popes and princes of later Italy as a, as a stone quarry. They would take, essentially they took all, they stripped it of all its interior marble. To use that in a variety of buildings of Rome, in Rome. And some of those we know their identification even today. Here's a view of one of the corridors where you can see once again those, those groin vaults or ribbed vaults that the Romans popularized. [COUGH] Connecting all these cities with one another where the streets of the city. We'll look at streets, especially in Pompeii where they are extremely well preserved. And these streets look very modern, you see the polygonal stones, but very modern in the use of the sidewalks, the sidewalks, there are drains as well. Along the sidewalks and then you can see, see these very deep rut marks where the wheels of the carts used to, used to, they, they, they over time obviously they made these ruts in the pavement. And then over here a small fountain. A fountain blessed by Hermes or Mercury. You can see him there with his wings and his caduceus. A small, a small fountain. Important obviously again, because most of the houses did not have running water. And there had to be a place that you could go to collect water for household use. One of the great things about Pompeii, of course, is it gives us the sense of of what life was like in ancient Roman times, daily life was like. And we'll look at millstones for bake and, and for bay, that are part of bakeries as well as ovens that look. Then the Romans invented everything, looked very much like a modern pizza oven, you go over to bar you'll see one of those. Over here, wine shops, we've lots of wine shops in these Roman cities and they're particularly well preserved in Herculaneum and in Pompeii. With these clay amphorae that were used to hold wines that were brought to Italy and also sometimes oils. They were brought to Italy from different parts of the world. Every Roman city had its McDonald's or its Wendy's or its Burger King. And I show one of those to you here, it's a called thermopolium as you can see down below thermopolium. A thermopolium was essentially what it was made up of is a it, it, it, it is a series of, counter, a counter with a series of recesses. And each day those who, those who ran the thermopolium put different food in there. And so when you got hungry, again, the whole sort of fast food idea. You'd just walk, walk by, like in a cafeteria, point out what you wanted, they'd serve it to you and you'd be on your way. So very much fast foods and we see lots of them in Pompeii and Herculaneum. We'll look at Roman houses. This is one example, the House of the Vettii in Pompeii. Spectacularly preserved house where we can see a pool that was actually used for collecting water, a hole in the ceiling, but a view from the atrium of the house into the garden. The garden over here, you get a sense of it. The greenery, the marble furniture, the fountains, and then the paintings on the walls. I mentioned at the beginning we'll spend a fair amount of time, we'll spend a few lectures on Roman painting. And the reason that I do that is, is be-,. it's absolutely gorgeous and it's fascinating. But it also allows us to get a better understanding of interior decoration among the Romans how they decorated their walls. But also because as you can see from this one example from Boscoreale, now in the Metropolitan museum the famous Met Cubiculum which is decorated with second style Roman wall painting that these paintings often depict buildings. They, they are architectural paintings and they are very important in that regard because we see, we often see experimentation in painting before we see it in architecture. And so there are going to be some things, for example, this broken triangular pediment, that we're going to see first in painting and then in built architecture. So painting, extremely important for us. We'll also go to the city of Ostia, the port of Rome which is a city very different from Pompeii. Because it essentially a second century Roman city rather than a first century Roman city The, the construction technique is concrete faced with brick. I show you one example of that. But what's most interesting about the houses in, in Ostia has to do with the kind of city it was. Again, the port of Rome, a commercial city, it was very congested, people were not as wealthy as those in the resort town of Pompeii. And consequently they needed, people didn't have single story houses like the one in Pompeii that I just showed me before, but rather apartment houses with multi stories. A kind of condominium idea. And these are fascinating in their difference from those in Pompeii and that's a difference that we will surely explore. The very well to do live in, very well to do had villas. The emperors had villas all along what is now the Amalfi Coast. Capri, the island of Capri, the emperor Augustus and Tiberius had 12 villas on the island of Capri. The most extraordinary villa, Hadrian's villa at Tivoli which I show you here from the air. At a, a kind of microcosm of the empire at that particular time. With extraordinary buildings, with pools. Decorated with sculpture that show the eclectic taste of the emperor, who liked things Roman, liked things Greek, liked things Egyptian. And statues of he, he was married but he also had a beloved young boy whom he met in Bithynia. Antinous, the famous Antinous that he met in Bithynia and who became the love his life. And when Antoninus died he, he created all kinds of shrines for Antinous and this is very important architecturally because all these interesting shrines, but in each of those shrines he created st, statutes of Antinous. And this is one showing Antinous as in Egyptian Pharaoh, which was perfect for this particular locale because it was meant to conjure up a canal in Egypt.

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